Thursday, September 23, 2010

[Alt: Since the goatee, glasses, and Seltzer & Friedberg DVD collection didn't tip you off, there will be a $20 negligence charge for this service.]

We've got a lot of problems over here today. But first:

HOLY CRAP there is a man in a white hat in this comic! His - his hat! it's....white! What does it mean?? Is it Mr. Hat in disguise? Is it Mr. Beret after a particularly harsh dryer cycle with no fabric softener? Is it a man with a square head and a blade in his forehead? Who knows! All we know is that he's totally wacky and acts just like any other xkcd character!

So - with that out of the way: A man is troubled by his former girlfriend of six months, and wishes he had known she was a liar. He probably could have tried to ask someone, but apparently he did not. He also didn't notice for six months, so one might think that some of the blame lies with him. I mean, he found out that all her ex-boyfriends thought that about her. But apparently he didn't bother to check until it was too late.

I am sure lots of xkcd fans can relate to this problem, and, like the typical fan, the main character choses not to blame his personal social skills or look for a human-interaction based solution; rather, he wishes there were a way that Internet could solve it for him! Oh, internet. YOU would never be a serial liar and break up with me after six months! Maybe i really just loved you all along!

Anyway, a lot of people have pointed out this idea before, including, apparently, actual websites which exist for this purpose. Certainly many news stories about Facebook or other social media websites (or our penchant for sharing too much information online these days) discuss the fact that even now but more in the future, people will be / are already able to do extensive background checks on future significant others. There was also this Abstruse Goose comic which, you have to admit, is exactly the same idea.

Besides the assumption that a person who is a bad boy or girlfriend for you must also be a bad boy or girlfriend for everyone else, there are other problems here. Why did he decide to specify a state? I guess there's nothing wrong with it but it just seemed odd. Why not have panel 3 end with something like "Maybe some people could try it out" and then panel 4 would be "Sorry ma'am, this person has a rating of over 95% on the international d bag scale" or something. Making it a government program just seems boring to me. Unless he thinks there is something funny about having a person's douchebag status be the official policy of a state government. But I think he'd be wrong about that.

=============

I see that Chainsawsuit is spending the week experimenting with different premises for the same artwork. I like it - in form, that makes it much like Dinosaur Comics, though he's given himself a much stricter set of drawings to work with. I'm surprised he could get more than one or two good comics out of it, but then again, Kris Straub is just a damn funny guy. I feel like Chainsawsuit (one of three comics he makes??! can that possible be true??) is funny with little to no effort - if he tried harder it would be even better, but as it is, he can get a lot of quality out of what I imagine as five second bursts of inspiration. He just has talent.

the sad thing is that he could've turned this into a Scott Pilgrim reference in the end, and it would at least have been a trainwreck with less casualties.

also, why do the jokes-of-this-variety-that-came-before-this-and-did-much-better keep using "selfish in bed" as a bad male trait? Like is there an overflow of men who get a woman home and immediately stuff their meat into her, get off, roll over and fall asleep? I can't even get started until I've gotten a girl wet, so I can't fathom what kind of effort it takes for a man to do any less, and why a woman would actually allow a man to do that. "Oh, now that we're home you're not going to kiss me or anything, just pull my pants down, unzip, and stick your shit in there. That's cool, I'll just let you finish and then sulk about it for the rest of my life."

The new comic is absolutely horrible. For starters, he picks Debian. Debian: the operating system that is tested for years to ensure stability before release. There is literally no other operating system that is so thoroughly tested to make sure everything works. The idea that something simple like that would get past the people at Gentoo, let alone Debian, is ridiculous.

That aside, the best thing he could think of is locusts? Seriously? Locusts? You sneak a package past the people at Debian, and all you can think of is it makes locusts swarm from the monitor?

On the note of the latest comic: I've spent enough time wanting to slap Randall for bullshitting any knowledge of liberal arts; now it's time for me to want to cockslap him for bullshitting any knowledge of computing. Since when does "dependency" mean "shit that flies out of your screen." Honestly? There's no sense to it. Dependencies are things a package requires to run. If you don't have them, you have to install it. It is something listed clearly for you to install, it is not something that is slipped in under the radar. "Dependency" does not equivocate to "feature" much like those included in those cluster installs we see on Windows. Which would have been an okay way to do it.

Jesus fuck Randall, this is coming from a Poli Sci/Cultural Studies major. Up your fucking game.

The Time Friends comics are actually old. Kris Straub made some, and had on the old "Web You.0" site a few comic generators where the panels were laid out, and you could type what you wanted in the balloons. There was a Time Friends comic generator, another for like some superhero-type comic, and I want to say there was a third one (maybe a police interrogation type situation).

Just wanted to point that out, if you read the comments on the recent Chainsawsuits there's a lot of people begging for the Time Friends generator to go back up. There were a lot of fantastic user-made comics posted on the site too. He says he's going on a month-long vacation so that's probably why he's posting these old comics.

Actually I have some really terrible Time Friends comics I made back in the day...I'll post 'em up, but I fully admit these are terrible.

Anyway, now that I'm done linking shitty comics, I have to say I don't get the newest xkcd so I don't feel qualified to speak on it. I mean, I'm sure it's unfunny and terrible, but I will admit that I honestly don't understand it so I won't criticize it.

Perhaps, but Python doesn't actually make you fly, either. And #including beer.h will not actually make a program that gives you beer. These jokes are actually pretty funny because we know that computers don't actually work that way. If the joke sucks, it's only because it's been done before.

@ 9:42- I've had a lot of female friends complain about just that, so I think there is an overflow of men out there who are selfish in bed. I'd guess that females put up with it because a lot of them are submissive and have been taught their whole lives to not argue, not make waves, and especially not to make sexual demands.

And even if you look at sex in movies- not even porn, just regular movies- that's pretty much how sex is portrayed. Like, they kiss for 30 seconds, MAYBE he fondles her breasts for 30 seconds, and then he's just sticking it in. Yet movie sex is often held up as some kind of ideal- people are always saying "Don't expect sex to be all perfect like it is in movies!"

One thing I actually LIKE about xkcd- even though people complain about it all the time- are the frequent portrayals of cunnilingus. Randall is a jerk in a lot of ways, but at least it makes it seem like he comprehends how sex works for women.

Anyways, I can't really comment on the new comic because I didn't get it and therefore didn't find it funny.

Movie seconds are often meant to be extended, I would say. 30 seconds in a movie of simply kissing is still cutting it in my opinion. Sure, real life doesn't work like that, but damned if I wanna sit in an action movie and spend 20 minutes watching foreplay.

Oh boy, random internet nerds trying to brag about how they are good at sex, and failing XD

The brain is the most important sex organ, you tools. And Chaos, some women don't even *like* cunnilingus. The suggestion that there is a certain way that "sex works for women" is dumb and working from a premise like that would only reduce communication, something which actually is very important for sex.

Sometimes "just sticking it in" conveys passion and need, and is often a much sexier sentiment than "OK, I am not a selfish lover, lie back and enjoy as I do all I can to please you!"

Me, I'd say I'm pretty average at sex. Despite being quite capable of being entirely unselfish in such matters. That's... that's just not what is important.

Clearly you are only seeing the very best 30 seconds of the 20 minute foreplay. It's like how you don't see Bob get out of bed, sit there for two minutes gathering his brain up, spend 15 minutes showering, etc etc.

>The new comic is absolutely horrible. For starters, he picks Debian. Debian: the operating system that is tested for years to ensure stability before release. There is literally no other operating system that is so thoroughly tested to make sure everything works. The idea that something simple like that would get past the people at Gentoo, let alone Debian, is ridiculous.

Unless that 'something simple' amounts to crippling OpenSSL's keygen to make it pathetically easy to break things encrypted on those systems. Or is that not the kind of simple you were talking about?

I think your premises are wrong. A person in love does not do background checks as a given, and deceptive people do have the ability to disguise it for a long time.This information does have to be "pushed" unto the lied-to.Of course this doesn't make the comic funny (it ain't), but please stick to legit claims.

I didn't understand the latest comic either. Not sure if it was funny or not but i did think it was rather similar to the ebay bobcat one... i'm pretty used to recycled jokes by now though.And i found the ebay bobcat one quite funny.

Sending a bobcat in a box is funny because it's plausible. How in the hell would installing a new package cause locusts to materialize out of your monitor? This strikes me as an extremely shit idea Randall has tucked away in his 'Fuck it, I can't think of anything today' drawer

Anon9:51, shut up. You're the reason people claim we have no sense of humor and all our criticism is bullshit. You have single-handedly made the dumbest comment I've ever seen about an xkcd comic(that's not in the xkcd forums)!

Back to the comics.

Newest comic is lame and nonsensical. Because I fail to see cohesion between this "aftermath-explanation" pair. Risking to sound like Anon9:51, because having "locusts" as dependency would cause locusts to appear, it'd cause the system to say "you need locusts to install this package". Unless the premise is that there's a "locusts" package that makes locusts appear. And in that case... wtf?

This joke could work with EULA. Like "I decided to see how many people would notice that my EULA contained a clause about a plague of locusts. I was not surprised." This is just a draft, but you get the gist, I suppose.

Anyway: lame way to end the week. Now we'll have comments on this lame panel+caption(refusing to call this a comic from now on) and people discussing how to make sex.

...seriously, get laid. Stop discussing how to make sex in a site like this and go get laid instead. Urk.

Ma as-salaamah,

Mole

PS.: Good point, rageful all-caps Plasma! Why would the script return a "they're in my clothes" error? It's the computer who's returning the error, not the user! Heck, Randall, way to make a comic so stupid I'm guessing not even my Comp Sci friends will link it on Twitter(I hope!)

The bobcat one was genuinely funny because the actual process by which the humour is generated, while implausible, is logical to anyone who knows how ebay works.

The Python one is genuinely funny because it extrapolates from Python's strengths regarding ease of use of additional libraries that one could actually gain superpowers just by importing some module you got off the Internet.

This one simply doesn't make have any sort of logical premise; yes, you could make locusts a dependency of your program, but that would indeed require you to have said locusts already installed. And so someone *else* would have had to package the locusts and get them into Debian? Is that supposed to be the joke, a sort of physical replay of the OpenSSL strip without any context?

As is depressingly common with xkcd now, it's simply not possible to even tell what Randall was going for here, other than "computers plus physical comedy equals lols".

The question is whether the locusts would pass the DFSG. IIRC they would check the dependancies for a package to go into debian-main so choosing Debian probably made the comic even worse. (Also dependancies don't work that way as others have said.)

I'm pretty much indifferent to sex whatsoever right now. Procreation literally is the most interesting thing about it to me.

The "Python" comic was NEVER funny! It was just a typical case of Randall going "LOL I just found out something AWESOME I'm TOTALLY gonna make a comic about it", and just at the last minute realising he needed to have something funny in it, and slamming some half-arsed joke at the end. That is not funny and has never been. And the latest comic is the archetypal *lame* xkcd comic.

Randall just found out his manly lumberjack ex-girlfriend has been giving out handjobs & BJs at the local truck stop when he's "at work" (i.e., when he's in his Cookie Monster pajamas sitting Indian Style on his bed eating Cap'n Crunch & "drawing my next strip").

@FC: Not understanding the comic doesn't mean it's bad; even though it might be bad due to other reasons. If you don't understand it, at least rant about it being a lame niche comic instead of generally proclaiming it not to be funny. Because, the Python one is kinda okay - certainly better than the latest.

My point (me being the shitstorm-dancer of this discussion) is that girls will not just let you shove it in, which is basically the most selfish act. There's going to be kissing at least. There's probably going to be petting, too. Yes, I do realize that there are like 9000 results on google about "selfish in bed" or something of the sort; those are usually from women with husbands or boyfriends who can actually afford to be selfish. If you're going to be hooking up, or otherwise even have any hand in the act of sex, you're gonna be like "hey wait a minute" if there is 0 seconds of foreplay. Now if you want to call a man selfish in bed if he at least makes an effort, but it's not to your liking (i.e. he makes out with you, gets your clothes off, feels you up for a bit, then jumps right into it) then you probably need to communicate more. At that point the term might be more "ignorant in bed" than "selfish."

Can we agree on this folks? Good, because this argument is really godamn retarded.

If you need to bring it back to topic, I have two things to comment on your comments. I love redundancy, and being redundant in general, it's like alliteration with words!

Back from my short word trip...

1. Cunnilingus and Randall. Randall is widely known for being a "white knight", so every time it is mentioned, shown or referred in xkcd it smells for me as Randall pandering to that exact train of thought. In short, Randall may be a jerk in a lot of ways, but he's still a jerk for pandering emptily. "Hey, look at me, I care about your pleasure! Love me!"

Of course, I might be horribly wrong.

2. "Yet movie sex is often held up as some kind of ideal- people are always saying 'Don't expect sex to be all perfect like it is in movies!'"

From what I understand, sex in movies is unrealistic because we have 30 seconds of foreplay and then the good ol' hanky spanky, and yet one can be called a sex god/dess with only that. It doesn't work that way, that's what you need to know not to expect from movies, it isn't THAT simple and generic.

You may also expect people to poop, unlike in most movies, where they seem devoid of a digestive system altogether.

In conclusion, I think sex works different for different people. And interesting part of "knowing" someone is to find out what works best.

Why are we talking about sex? Just have some, feel ashamed about how poorly you did afterwards like the rest of us and then get back to things that matter. Like talking about how the new XKCD is pure unadulterated shit.

Nah, the moral of "import butterflies" was "emacs rocks". This one seems to be "package managing is magical".

So, I searched "xkcd EULA" and found panel-in-panel+caption(still refusing to call it comic) 501. Which means my first suspicion of Randall not using an EULA to do this joke rather than a dependency list isn't fueled by a fear of losing his "cool nerd" image by mentioning these damned things of proprietary software.

I'd do an edit of this thing, but it'd be so pathetically easy I'm ashamed of losing 5 minutes in it.

Instead, I'll write a comment.

Dewa mata,

Mole

PS.: Carl, what the heck is that thing followed by "????" next to the image?!

Getting back to 796 for a moment. It's interesting that Randall doesn't like Seltzer & Friedberg. Their "humor" is pretty much entirely an attempt to elict recognition chuckles. GOOMHS&F, I just saw 300/Twilight. Maybe Randall is jealous that their shtick is even more (inexplicably) successful than his is.

Seltzer and Friedberg are not only terrible but also apparently really successful with an audience that Randall and his fans are not a part of, so therefore saying it's terrible gets him instant laffs and GOOMHR's. Which is, incidentally, the exact thing Seltzer and Friedberg are doing by making fun of Twilight.

I totally can't resist the chance to show off my SEX CHOPS since this is the internet and nobody can prove my dubious truths.

the saying "The brain is the biggest sex organ" doesn't mean a literal massaging of the brain, lecter style is the way to go to get your buddies stiff 'n' moist, it's BASICALLY saying that sexual attraction passes through the conduit of the mind-

I mean, if I was to unceremoniously pinch CHAOS's clit like I was trying to burst a blister, or just rubbing it as if I was trying to get rid of a knot in my shoulder, without any ceremony, then aside from being a randallesque rapist, I can imagine I wouldn't elicit much response, especially if I was coming across as disinterested or not really getting into it.

Really it just means be cereberal in what you do- use everything at your disposal to make the other person want you. If you're the fairer sex then strap your chosen partner to a chair and then do a sexy striptease or something. When you get down to the CLITORIS or GLANS then rather than worrying about having the right technical skills, (which help) make what you're doing sexy and stimulating as well.

I mean what I like to do with my girl is get her legs and one arm tied to the bed, and tease and stroke her until she's begging for me, then I nibble her ear and talk dirty to her how she's my dirty slut etc and masturbate her. IF SHE'S LUCKY I let her know how much of a dirty bitch she is by fingering her anally while she does her thing with a vibrator.

Rampant ass-sex usually ensues. She likes oral (cunnilingus and anallingus) but it has the downside of her not wanting to kiss me afterwords (understandable)

SO YEAH- Don;t neglect the brain, OR the sexual organs, just work them in tandem.

For a saying that's bandied about so often I can imagine it's already hugely obvious to 90% of the population having regular sexy times

The facts that 1) you were made horny simply by typing something on the internet, 2) you used the term "ass-sex," and 3) you got creepily obsessive and detailed about all the things you do during sex, all suggest you are a lying virgin living in a fantasy world.

I thought that the idea behind 797 was that Debian hates people who have locusts in their house and that the narrator created a program that only people who have locusts flying around their heads can open. The guy who's opening the program is just really excited about the prospects of using Debian to send secret messages to fellow locust aficionados; unfortunately the locusts already ate his tongue so he can't pronounce the "y" in Yaaaaaaaa!

Also, he's doing a spastic dance that causes him to fall backwards out of his chair in order to celebrate the imminent downfall of Debian at the hands of those it once persecuted.

ITT people demonstrate that asperger's is contagious. Stay away from XKCD, guys, even if you only intend to ridicule it. You might get confused about things like locusts coming out of a computer screen THAT CAN'T REALLY HAPPEN YOU GUYS WTF IS GOING ON HERE.

"[...] because having "locusts" as dependency [...]'d cause the system to say "you need locusts to install this package" " -- Mole

I think the idea of getting locusts and trying to put them into your computer [all to run said program because it said so] is actually pretty funny and would be pretty hard to screw up entirely. I wish Randall had done that instead, but that'd probably require more panels.

RE the internet people: you're all worse the Randall, and he thinks he has a computer formula for the female orgasm. inputs --(any girl)--> output. I hear they call him Blandall.

Captcha: ingen. You have to shovel lots of coal in if you want to start my ingen (if you know what I mean).

Honestly, I don't mind pandering (within mediums of humor.) It's fine as long as it's, you know, actually funny.

XKCD has always pandered to nerds, but it USED to actually be funny. Now 90% of the comics are unfunny and/or downright inaccurate. And humor loses a lot when it's so inaccurate that it just doesn't even make sense.

Like, I've never known any liberal arts major who got mad about the song "What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?" from Avenue Q. But people get mad at Randall's comics that insult liberal arts majors, because for one thing, they're not funny and often don't even contain an actual joke, and for another thing they're often inaccurate and show that Randall is totally ignorant about the liberal arts. Thus, it's merely offensive, not funny.

If a comic references something I like/makes fun of something I hate, but does it in a FUNNY and accurate way, then that's fine and I probably will like the joke more because of the fact that I agree with it. But it's a problem when there's merely a reference with no actual humor.

Nate - your comics were fun, but shouldn't they have all ended in "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO" rather than another exclamation? Or is that just a "this week" thing? Anyway, thanks for the backstory. I didn't realize chainsawsuit had such a vast and rewarding world to it.

Now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know now I know listen to the wise listen to the wise listen to the wise listen to the wise listen to the wise listen to the wise listen listen listen to the wise man la la la la la la la la la la la la...

my take on this is that the only people who would use this service of randalls are the ones with "awful personalities" (see: randall) so it would basically just be a bunch of shitty people whining about how their ex left them because of how shitty they are

the people most likely to be accused of being bad boyfriends or girlfriends are not the bad boyfriends and girlfriends themselves but those individuals who hurt their feelings by basically not being willing to put up with their constant bullshit

as for me no type of woman sounds less appealing than the kind that would complain about her ex boyfriends on a fucking website (i imagine the crossover between these girls and the ones that spend every waking hour making melodramatic status updates on facebook and twitter is remarkably high)

question: who really needs a web site or service to tell them about the person they are dating or thinking about dating

answer: bad judges of character and people who think too highly of themselves

I read the ex registry comic as making exactly your point - well, maybe it really doesn't. There is no direct correlation between average-stick-guy in the first three panels and goatee/glasses-stick-guy in the last. Nonetheless, I read it as "maybe such a service wouldn't be that good for you because you're a jerk". That probably made it better than with the intended meaning.

xkcd isn't perfect, certainly, and the author comes up with some stuff that I would agree with. Eg: The tumbleweed comic. However, taking the strip as a commentary about political and social issues, and taking offense at EVERYTHING? Why can't it just be a comic?

No they don't. Webcomics are simply a series of tubes which funnel nerd or pop culture references directly into your retina. The only objective measure of the quality of a comic is how obscure the reference is. The only pleasure to be derived from them is the perverse pleasure of knowing that you are among the elite few who understood the reference.

Pfft, the comic medium is crap everyone knows it just ask DC and Marvel.

I am curious though, how would xkcd apologists feel if, say, Joss Whedon's works started to falter and he kept spewing worse and worse crap. I would hope that, as fans of him (I am assuming that most xkcd fans, and indeed most losers, are retarded Whedon lovers) and good art in general, they get offended and pissed off rather than just pass it off as "Hey, it's just a TV show/movie/comic/whatever."

@UndercoverCuttlefish Yeah, I know what you mean. I actually put a scathing and obviously-bitter report of myself up on dontdatehimgirl.com to screen out the sort of people who would take trash like that seriously.

that's the thing, though. "it's just an X" is not valid for anything. every work of art (and I am generously including XKCD here) was produced by an artist who lives in a society and has opinions on things. that artist's very existence is informed and shaped by the society he is part of. he can produce good and bad things, and things with varying levels of insight, but a comic is not somehow more than a comic if it also happens to have political opinions or if it also happens to say something about society.

"it's just a movie" is probably something you hear a lot in response to people criticizing that various American comedies are cultural shitholes which perpetuate every possible kind of bigoted stereotype in the name of cheap laughs and indicate everything that's wrong with society. nobody is claiming it's more than a movie--merely that it is a movie which is actively damaging to our culture.

xkcd isn't quite so terrible as that, but Randall exemplifies a rather repugnant element of "nerd culture," and he makes a comic which reflects this fact. to take the comic at face value is to take it as a cultural artifact--because that's exactly what comics are. this one just happens to suck.

Time Friends comics usually do end in "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" but as Doc Skullthumper pointed out, it isn't a standard (even Straub himself used other exclamations at the end). He just didn't pick any that broke the mold this week.

And no problem! I, like others, really wish that the halfpixel site was as good now as it used to be and that the comic generators would come back. Now I'm in the same boat as people waiting for Checkerboard Nightmare to come back.

...speaking of Checkerboard Nightmare, interestingly, this was the last comic:

ionno about most of these because I haven't seen them, but Scott Pilgrim is the XKCD of movies. Seriously, its success is determined only by how much it panders to every kind of dork culture (not nerd or geek culture mind, it doesn't go that deep).

I'm fucking sick of people making these sort of artificial designations between "dork" "geek" etc. They may have marginally different connotations but they all imply a level of social improficiency. Joan of Arc was not a "religion geek" and Frank Sinatra was not a "music geek." I think the idea is basically to say "enjoying Dungeons and Dragons makes you a geek" when it's really "people who play Dungeons and Dragons tend to be socially awkward." Yes, that fact is completely due to social norms, I imagine, but it's still true, and it's not an excuse.

Also fuck satire; nowadays it's just used as a means of useless ideological galvanization instead of actually motivating social action 95% of the time. Want to change the world? Don't draw a political cartoon of Barack Obama or George Bush - how about you actually get involved in politics in a meaningful way, at whatever level, or give blood or build houses or something?

This blog isn't "satire" and it wouldn't be even if it were just an elaborate joke (which it isn't). It is no more or less than a venting ground for a bunch of (largely) like-minded people's opinions. Don't try to think this is some Oscar Wilde critic-as-artist shit, or conversely some subconscious Freudian sexual frustration when it's just people making fun of something.

@10:42 and 10:46There's a venn diagram that explains the difference (see: http://images.cryhavok.org/d/1891-1/Nerd+Venn+Diagram.png). If Scott Pilgrim were pandering to nerds, there'd be some linux jokes or advanced calcshits or something like that. The only thing it really did though was scrape the disgusting dead skin layer of anime, video game, and graphic novel culture.

@10:48It was a piece of shit hipster wish-fulfillment movie, and it doesn't deserve to exist; and if you honestly thinks it's good then you're just GOOMHing.

"A man is troubled by his former girlfriend of six months, and wishes he had known she was a liar. He probably could have tried to ask someone, but apparently he did not. He also didn't notice for six months, so one might think that some of the blame lies with him. I mean, he found out that all her ex-boyfriends thought that about her. But apparently he didn't bother to check until it was too late."

I'll agree that this comic isn't particularly funny, but I hope you realize that the above bit I quoted ISN'T THAT UNUSUAL. I mean, if you're in a relationship with someone who is a crazy liar-type, you don't realize it immediately, and if someone tells you "your girl is crazy" you're gonna be inclined to trust your Significant Other over your friend. Sometimes it takes months for the house of cards to fall apart, dude.

also, "Who knows! All we know is that he's totally wacky and acts just like any other xkcd character!"WRONG. I dunno if you actually read what White-Hat-Dude was saying, but all he said was "Who would agree to run it?" That doesn't strike me as particularly wacky.

I'm down with you Carl, and I'm down with what you do, but you can't get mad at Randall for errors (of the punchline/art/factual variety) and then turn around and blurt out incorrect things in response. It kills the whole premise of this blog.

Did you get the irony? Or was it intended? Goodness, I loled. Anyways. I'm really not mad. This blog makes me uptight in the same way that Westborough Baptist Church makes me uptight. Really sad and disturbed that they exist, but comforted by their comparative insignificance.

Also, I was honored to get a response from the author on my first post. =3

I wonder if the whole 'State of California' thing is just an obscure reference to how wacky their laws tend to be. My business law teacher once said that "common law is how it works everywhere except California."

Sorry, didn't mean for you guys to take it like that. I apologize. It's just the way it makes me feel, not how you (two?) act. Certainly you don't make quite as much of a hateful impact on the world, although I think the term "Bigot" will still apply here.

Also, fanboy? How rude. I'm appalled. I am under the impression that my stance on the comic was pretty moderate. On the contrary, I even went so far as to partly agree with you.

And here I thought that you and I actually had a discussion going. Now it seems to me like you are the one trolling. On your home turf, no less. You didn't say anything about anything I said. You are just back on the fanboy insult, which I assume is the standard fallback for anyone that disagrees with your site. If I call you an xkcdsucks fanboy, do I win the argument too?

And, I am trying harder! I am trying SO HARD to get you to actually talk to me. I really am. :(

I responded to the part where you said you weren't a fanboy. do try to keep up.

it's only a standard response to exceptionally stupid fanboys such as yourself. I just don't bother wasting my time with actual responses to people so stupid they think that people who dislike their precious webcomic are bigots.

Well, here we are. At the point that all internet discussions eventually come to. We are now talking past each other. I can literally accomplish nothing if you continue to respond like this. If indeed you are a person of more than moderate intelligence, you know that I have made points, and you have ignored them in favor of more trolling. I challenge you to respond to those points. I challenge you to talk to me, and argue with me, as opposed to tossing insults, and brushing me off as a hater. And, if you don't accept, all of YOUR site's fanboys will still praise you. You won't really lose face (because you sure as hell PWWWWNT that troll RITE GUYSE), except with the new visitors that read these. If you do....well maybe we might just have a good discussion. God forbid that happens on the net.

wait, you think that arguing with someone who thinks that disliking a comic makes you a bigot is a good discussion?

look, fuckwit. I've had good discussions on here with XKCD fans and haters alike. it's not hard to have an intelligent discussion on here--you just have to not be a mindless fuck who thinks that calling someone a bigot for hating your precious webcomic is the correct step to make towards having an intelligent discussion, or being taken seriously. (HINT: it is not.)

and the more you defend your sad concern trolling as something intelligent and noteworthy, the less interest I have in doing anything but make fun of you. primarily because it reveals that you really are a complete fucking moron.

Well, that post was badly worded, offensive, and bigoted. Exactly what I expected from you, although I was hoping for an actual response. Good job. You sure showed them trolls. I won't bother responding seriously. Have a good night.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Divided into two convenient categories, based on whether you think this website

Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.